The third-person narration does something else as well: It gives the book a more non-fiction feeling than a first-person novel, almost like we are reading a piece of journalism instead of a work of art. That alone provides some tension and mystery right away. Camus writes, in a parenthetical, that the narrator's "identity will be made known in due course." I didn't realize how brilliant that was the first time I read the book, but I see it clearly now: We all know a plague is coming, we all know many characters are going to die, but we don't know which characters are going to die yet-although, obviously, whoever is narrating the book is not going to die, otherwise he or she would not be able to narrate the book. Intriguingly, the narrator of The Plague is going to turn out to be one of the characters currently being referred to in the third person. That's what he gets for underestimating the problem. In a previous post, I mentioned Michel, the concierge who thought the reason dead rats kept showing up in the hallways of his hotel was because youngsters were leaving them there for him to find, messing with him. You made it! You made it through Part One of The Plague, full of feverish crotches, rats bleeding from the mouth, and cats being spit on, among other odd horrors. This week's Quarantine Club discussion questions are at the end of this post. Albert Camus, on the right, winning his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.
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